Ph.D. Database

The aim of the IACR Ph.D. database is twofold. On the first hand, we want to offer an overview of Ph.D. already completed
in the domain of cryptology. Where possible, this should also include a subject classification, an abstract, and
access to the full text.
On the second hand, it deals with Ph.D. subjects currently under investigation. This way, we provide a timely
map of contemporary research in cryptology.
All entries or changes need to be approved by an editor. You can contact them via phds (at) iacr.org.

AbstractThe notion of identity-based encryption (IBE) was proposed as an economical alternative to public-key infrastructures. IBE is also a useful building block in various cryptographic primitives such as searchable encryption. A generalization of IBE is attribute-based encryption (ABE). A major application of ABE is fine-grained cryptographic access control of data. Research on these topics is still actively continuing.

However, security and privacy of IBE and ABE are hinged on the assumption that the authority which sets up the system is honest. Our study aims to reduce this trust assumption.

The inherent key escrow of IBE has sparkled numerous debates in the cryptography/security community. A curious key generation center (KGC) can simply generate the user's private key to decrypt a ciphertext. However, can a KGC still decrypt if it does not know the intended recipient of the ciphertext? This question is answered by formalizing KGC anonymous ciphertext indistinguishability (ACI-KGC). All existing practical pairing-based IBE schemes without random oracles do not achieve this notion. In this thesis, we propose an IBE scheme with ACI-KGC, and a new system architecture with an anonymous secret key generation protocol such that the KGC can issue keys to authenticated users without knowing the list of users' identities. This also matches the practice that authentication should be done with the local registration authorities. Our proposal can be viewed as mitigating the key escrow problem in a new dimension.

For ABE, it is not realistic to trust a single authority to monitor all attributes and hence distributing control over many attribute-authorities is desirable. A multi-authority ABE scheme can be realized with a trusted central authority (CA) which issues part of the decryption key according to a user's global identifier (GID). However, this CA may have the power to decrypt every ciphertext, and the use of a consistent GID allowed the attribute-authorities to collectively build a full profile with all of a user's attributes. This thesis proposes a solution without the trusted CA and without compromising users' privacy, thus making ABE more usable in practice.

Underlying both contributions are our new privacy-preserving architectures enabled by borrowing techniques from anonymous credential.